They are young. They are all batchmates from IIT and they think they are on to something truly big – ads on mobile Internet. Meet mKhoj and its founders – Naveen Tewari, Amit Gupta and Abhay Singhal. What made them jump into it? In the late 1990s, the Internet was spreading rapidly and there was money to be made in developing sites that dominated the Internet such as Yahoo! and Google. The...

Gupta: I was doing my final year thesis at IIT Bombay in fingerprinting. It involved looking at a fingerprint image and extracting important information. An image is very heavy in digital form. If you want to analyse it, the trick is to make it lighter. We used an algorithm to achieve this and analyse the data. But what was built...

In the mid-1990s, Manish Shukla was a corporate executive looking for fresh merchandising ideas. For this, he was scouting around for a merchandising consultant who could tell him how to make a brand speak to the consumer and convince him/her to buy. “Since I could not find a person who could provide me with the right merchandising advice, I thought, let me give it a shot,” says Manish Shukla....